Blue Microphones Mikey review

Microphone accessories for Apple's iPods come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from miniature mono microphones to fully-fledged mobile-recording rigs. If your needs are somewhere between voice memos and professional audio, the Blue Microphones Mikey, available for around £60, fills the gap well, offering a surprising level of recording quality at an affordable price.

Retrotastic
There's a retro, radio-era design philosophy that runs through all of Blue Microphones' products, and the Mikey is no exception. The microphone measures 64 by 44 by 13mm, and looks right at home connected to the bottom of an iPod classic. The Mikey looks rather like the lopped-off top of a 1950s broadcaster microphone, weaving together a black metal mic grille and chromed plastic trim into an unapologetically square design.

The bottom edge of the Mikey features a standard 30-pin iPod dock connector that swivels independently of the microphone, allowing the mic to be positioned 90° upwards or downwards. Just above the iPod connector are three LED indicators marked with squiggly lines that represent the microphone's three gain settings (loud, medium and quiet). A ridiculously small switch on the opposite side is used to set the microphone gain into one of the three modes.

The Mikey attaches to your iPod via a hinge that swivels backwards and forwards 90°

Overall, the Mikey feels solid and reliable, and its rotating design offers a distinct advantage over products such as the Belkin TuneTalk or the Griffin iTalkPro. The tiny gain switch on the back is frustrating to use without a pen or a long fingernail to nudge it along, but, on the other hand, the lack of accessibility prevents the setting from changing accidentally.

Undercover features
The Mikey is designed to do just one thing: record stereo audio to your iPod using an integrated microphone. You're not going to find an optional line input jack, USB pass-through or an independent headphone output, as you would on something like the Belkin GoStudio. We do appreciate, however, that there's a small mono speaker on the back of the Mikey, which, despite its tinny sound, allows you to review recordings without plugging in your headphones.

Like any iPod microphone accessory, the Mikey's recording features are tied to the limitations of the iPod it's connected to. The iPod records to only two formats: 44kHz/16-bit WAV or 22kHz/16-bit WAV. Some iPods, such as the fourth-generation iPod nano, display a volume meter during recordings that can help you gauge which gain setting to use in a given situation. Our old fifth-generation iPod, however, offers no such metering and has a habit of polluting recordings with intermittent hum from its hard drive (a problem we've found on all iPod recorders we've tested).

An iPod like the second-generation touch isn't technically supported by the Mikey, but we were able to capture some recordings using the BIAS iProRecorder App. Support for the iPhone and touch may come later, but, for now, using the Mikey with the touch and iPhone is unreliable, at best.